Dealing with rejection.

Hi, as I seem to have blagged my way onto writing for Rooha, I thought my first piece should be on rejection. Now, I'm sure that you've all had your fair share of knockbacks, we all have, but it seems that some things don't change. Hell, I bet even Tom Cruise had a few ladies turning him down because he was "too good to be true." (and, well.... Scientology is just that proof of this.)

But back to the real world where problems cannot simply be forgotten by throwing an incomprehensible amount of money at it, (or just putting it down to those bloody aliens) And I don't really want to touch on relationships, mainly because I'd be here all day. However, elsewhere in life we encounter rejection all the time, whether it be being last to be picked for the school team at any particular event, be it football, chess, kiss-chase... (I'm still not 100% au fait with the rules on the last one, although perhaps that helps to explain my multiple issues with girls.)

The real crimes against your being, the metaphorical slap in the face, or kick in the balls (I feel that really helps to conjure an image of true unadulterated hurt) is when you have done something, that in your heart you know will come back and nibble at your conscience. Such examples, (and I'll use some from personal experience) are;

1. Maintaining a lie, usually to family; but always somebody who knows you well enough to eek out the truth. One such example, I decided that instead of showing my maturity when producing the most godawful smelling fart in existence, I calmly blamed my dog, and kept blaming my dog for around a week. He was left outside for a number of nights, and my guilt was in overdrive. (sorry Chip...)

2. Hearing the immortal words... "I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed in you". This sentence, and it truly is a sentence as you find yourself searching for comebacks and excuses, has to, be the most rejecting and painful thing that a parent can say.

3. Last but not least, relationships. I know what you're saying, 'but you said leave it for another time?!' Well, you've misquoted somewhat, but the point remains, rejection from a potential significant other, is so undeniably crushing that I think it may even beat point 2, let's face it, there's only so many times you can be told, "it's not you, it's me".


So, my philosophy to life is, eventually I'll have to deal with the consequences of my actions, but for now everything is top gun.

Pint of bitter, please, landlord.

For some reason, now unfathomable, I once thought that I would not only be aware, but at the forefront of popular culture well into my seventies. Unlike my father, I would be picking up the latest #1 hit album on the way to the pension office (if such a thing still exists after the Cameron debacle has finished its reign of terror). Then I would go down the local club and dance the night away, a bottle of toxic florescence half-finished in one hand, the change from a £50 note in the other.

Alas, it has taken but a few years to realise that I would prefer to sit down the local pub (no music, preferably nobody else under the age of 50, a sour faced barman) with a pint of ale. I now look at disgust at the 'buy 2 Wkd's 4 £10' signs that I would have loved maybe even just two years ago, as I sit down by the window and complain about a child riding a bike outside. Bastard.

The moment of change came this weekend - I was reading the Guardian website, when I came across an article about the Libertines and their recent headline performance.

"You might wonder if this dated-sounding guitar band who fudge every solo and talk nonsense inbetween songs had in fact lost their way to the BBC Introducing Stage. But then you were never going to get it. Those of us who've ever invested even a sliver of emotion in this band, however, were paid-back 10 fold, the willing of the crowd emotionally auto-tuning out the musical mistakes."

I was never the greatest fan of the Libertines, but I would readily shout along to 'Don't Look Back Into The Sun' on a dancefloor filled with similarly intoxicated people. But the comment 'dated-sounding' was the wake up call - things had changed, and I had fallen by the wayside. One of the first comments about the piece read:

"I'll never forget the first time I heard The Libertines perform Don't Look Back In To The Sun on the NME awards, it was my first step towards falling in love with music."

When the first Libertines album came out, it was September 2003. I was starting Sixth Form and I remember reading an article, probably in a shoddy tabloid, about how Metallica were headlining the Reading/Leeds festival. One of the lines read something like, 'When I was younger, Metallica were the greatest thing I had ever heard - back in the 1980's, they were the thing that made me pick up a guitar.'

I remember thinking that I would never get in a position when I would need to reflect on things, as things would never pass me by. Yet, the music that I had grown up with has been confined to a period of history, to replaced by, well - I don't know, I don't listen to it. One glance at the Top 40 confuses me to the point I wonder if I have dementia. Even Oasis have split up.

It seems, with The Libertines in tow (a questionable companion, if ever there was one), time has not just caught up with me, but sprinted ahead. Shit.

-Phil Seaman

Bread is dead

'Log on to Kingsmill confessions now and send us yours', advises a recent advert for Kingsmill the breadmakers. Are people really doing this? Are people really stealing unguarded sandwiches and then logging the theft on some kind of database? It doesn't sound like something people would do, but you never know what will capture the imagination of the British public. Without wanting to get in to too much depth, some of the thefts sound quite poorly executed. I know it isn't supposed to be Diagnosis Murder - nobody would even think of trying to steal Dick Van Dyke's sandwich, but, for example, in one scenario the original sandwich creator is tricked in to thinking he just never made it in the first place. Amnesia, it's a serious business, let's not start using it to gain free sandwiches.
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Unbelievably there's even a website dedicated to the art of sandwich stealing. Perhaps even more unbelievably people are logging incidents on it, 'I lock myself in the stationery cupboard at work so I can enjoy my favourite sandwich in peace and quiet', writes the amigously named Julie. You lock yourself in there or you've been locked in there Julie? There's only one word different, but it changes the tone of the whole thing. Colleagues are questioning your sanity, people are talking about you and wondering if you're OK. In short, you have bigger problems to contend with.
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Another effort from Kingsmill pictures a teenager asleep in bed. Nothing can wake him, not even some kind of Wallace and Gromit style contraption with symbols and bells attached to it. A real nightmare, and I can't tell you how many families I know who have resorted to a series or pullies and levers to wake their child up. Fortunately a solution is at hand, the mother toasts some bread, wafts the sweet scent up the stairs using the door and, as if by magic, the teenager surfaces and eats all of the toast. A charming story, almost certainly based on real events.
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What these companies all seem to have in common is a similar element of borderline lunacy that has made them think people care about bread. Trust me, they don't. If Kingsmill shut down tomorrow, it would take me three, four or even five months to anyone to even notice. Sometimes you have to just accept the sad truth that you're product is what it is. It's isn't going to evolve, improve or really become any better or worse than it was when it started. Not that this logic has stopped some companies from trying and succeeding at reinenting the wheel as what is essentially the same wheel. The common toothbrush is a good example of a product which has supposedly been evolving for years and still looks exactly the same. The fact is that people need bread. People will buy bread. Who really knows what actually makes you choose one type over another? I suppose for the one person that managed to pursuade Warburtons in to an ill fated production run of Jolly Ranchers flavoured white loaves might enjoy that one loaf and buy it, but I imagine it's generally the little things. Which name do I remember? Which loaf hasn't been trodden on by the shelf stacker that stacked it? Which is least expensive? For these reasons perhaps it's the companies cited here that are really getting it right and holding my attention the most.

Two's company

Have you ever wondered what makes you choose a particular seat on an empty bus, or a certain urinal in an empty toilet. Convienience? Superstition? Perhaps if you're a woman you might well wonder how you've ended up in a toilet with urinals in to in the first place, but no matter. There is an unwritten code, I think it's a British thing. It differs from region to region, but I'll come on to that later. If you walk on to a bus or train and the seats are all empty, you'll pick any vacant seat. Eveyerone else, unless they happen to know someone on the bus or train, will do the same thing until all seats are half filled. Then any newcomers have to start sitting next to people they don't know, and that's when you get these regional differences. In London, getting a seat on public transport is like winning the lottery, they're like gold dust to these people. A copy of the Metro or London Lite and a seat, they'd choose it over sex I'm sure of it. It doesn't matter who that seat is next to or how inconvenient it is to get it either. Children will fall to the floor, people who are reading will be jogged (and because of said Britisness show no emotion at all). Elsewhere in the country, people won't do this. They would rather stand than be so forward as to actually sit down on an empty seat next to someone they don't know. Sometimes the first incumbent of the other seat will try and engineer ways to keep the seat next to them free, they'll guard it with a bag or fall asleep on it. We really are quite an odd species when it comes to possession of public seating.

xxx

Anyway, this long introductory digression aside, I was recently on a train. You don't know need to know why I was on a train, there wasn't any particularly top secret about it, it just isn't really relavent. The fact is, I was on a train. It wasn't empty, but it was certainly closer to being empty than it was to being full, there were many empty seats. The train stopped at one of these Godforsaken villages you wish it would just drive straight though. An elderly man gets on and after looking down the carriage and deciding the walk wasn't for him sat next to me. You just don't do this. These aren't the rules. This isn't what has been agreed. There are other seats available, people start to think we must know each other, we don't! The man then continues to indiscreetly read my newspaper, this is where the Britishness comes in again. I begin to feel guilty for turning the page of my own newspaper in case this strange man hasn't finished reading the review of this week newly released albums. What a bizzare situation, occasionally I would turn and he would quickly look away as if to try and mask the fact he was stealthily, or unstealthily as the case may be, enjoying my newspaper. When I eventually got up to get off the train I left it there, although I suspect he'd already read most of it. The trouble in this situation is you can't just say 'excuse me, don't be offended, I don't begrudge you sitting in that particular seat, but I'm going to move to another one so I can stretch out'. Even if you're on a long journey and by the time you get to where you're going to there are barely any people left on the train, people feel rude moving. As if you've developed some kind of connection in the time you've been thrown together by chance for 40 minutes or so that makes you both feel obliged to stay where you are.

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On the way back the other way, the same thing happened. This woman smelled of vodka, I think I really just paid the inevitable price for choosing a seat near the doors, it's invariably going to attract people either incapacitated by alcohol or age that can't or won't walk very far. I don't think there's really any conclusion I can draw from my experiences other than that when you're on the train or the bus you've bought one seat. Sometimes you don't even get that. You have no right or ownership over the other seat, it's a total lottery. All you can do is hope that if someone does target the next to yours they are at least odorless and bring reading material of their own.

Signs That Scare

By Alex Allen

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Have you ever seen a sign or a certificate that was obviously designed to reassure or convey some kind of positive intention but had completely the opposite effect? That's probably quite a in concise way to express that thought, so let me give you some examples. On the bus today there was a sign which read, 'safety is important to us, that's why we enter our drivers for safe driving awards'. You enter your drivers? I'm sorry, but that really doesn't mean anything. That's like me putting myself forward for the job of senior surgeon at BUPA and then opening my own drop in health clinic in the local shopping mall and performing surgery on strangers while telling about my extensive healing credentials. A complete nonsense. For the record the bus driver was not a safe driver and almost caused a collision on a roundabout, I suppose that illustrates the point. The fact is that, to me, 'we've entered' translates as 'didn't win'. It's a bit like when you see 'Oscar nominated' on Tom Cruise DVDs. What does that mean? Again, 'didn't win'. Bad luck Tom, I can see why you're trying to sell this film as Oscar worthy, but it wasn't and you aren't fooling anyone.

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But let's not turn this in to some kind of crusade against Tom Cruise, there examples closer to home, too. I've seen a local takeaway that has a certificate for 'basic food hygiene level 1' in the window. What the hell is that? It doesn't exactly inspire confidence does it? That this place has managed to certify that, as a general rule, they've managed to avoid poisoning anybody. I suppose that there's a chance that there are other takeaways that don't have this certificate, but to be honest until I saw it in the window I wasn't even thinking about food hygiene. It was that unnerving certificate that made me begin to think 'hold on, level 1? How many levels are there? Is this actually cooked?' It isn't as if I'm up to date with takeaway hygiene awards, not really my forte, someone could have just knocked this 'award' up in 5 minutes on Microsoft Publisher who am I to know? Bottom line, do I feel more reassured after seeing the certificate than I did before, probably not.

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It's not just a written thing though, have you ever heard someone say that for all another person's faults, as least 'their heart is in the right place'? This, to me, seems like the least you should expect as a functional human. If it weren't true you probably wouldn't be functional at all, you'd be dead. So if the absolute best thing someone can think to say about you is that, physically at least, you're capable of operating correctly on a day to day basis even though the things you are actually doing are probably pretty despicable, that really doesn't say a great deal about you as a person. You're greatest asset is something that a, is true of the majority of other people, and b, is something you had absolutely no control over in the first place. Finally, have you ever been walking somewhere quite innocently when someone's massive dog jumps on you and the owner, usually called something like Sheila, tells you that 'he likes you'. I'm sorry, but that clearly is not the case, your dog is biting my leg. I like people, I don't bite them. You have no idea whether your dog likes me, you or the brand of dog food you feed it, it's just a dog. Let's not go mental. Rather, let's stop laughing like this is a hilarious turn of events and get rid of this dog. Not necessarily from the Earth altogether, but at the very least from my leg.

Posting Away Your Possessions

By Alex Allen

I know that money is tight at the moment, but is there really a necessity for the plethora of companies advertising on TV for us to send various things off to them in envelopes for money? The first example of this that registered on my radar was Envirofone, a website that will give you money for old mobile phones. What exactly are they doing with these phones? Because, come to think of it, I never actually bothered to ask. So fixated was I with the cheque for £11.72 that had come through the post that I hadn't even contemplated what they might be doing with my Sony Ericsson K700i. It's not that I particularly begrudge someone inheriting my collection of numbers for local takeaways and my high score for Bejewelled, it would just be nice to know. 'Send us your phone, it'll help the environment' advises the chav in the advert. Will it? How? That isn't a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely intrigued. Is someone else going to get my phone? Are they just going to strip it down and make vending machines out of it or what? Frankly I do wonder where the product I'm going to spend my £11.72 Argos voucher on will prove to be any less redundant to me in three weeks than the phone I've just relinquished. Or perhaps there is a website in the pipeline to deal with those, too. There are many websites such as this, Envirofone was just the first that came to mind, so perhaps their awful advertising campaign was the best of the bunch. Mazuma Mobile are another, at first I wondered whether Mazuma was a word at all. It is, it's actually a 19^th Century Yiddish slang term for money. I'm sure that won't be lost at all on the sort of people sending their belongings in. I think I've just become more of a cynic, but I do wonder what the catch is. It seems like quite a generous offer when, to be honest, if someone came round and asked if they could have it I'd probably give it to them. It would be an odd request, and if you're reading this and thinking of coming round and trying your luck I'd request you don't.

Of course the thing about sending an old phone somewhere is that the object is generally worthless to the sender anyway. The service works because it's offering you money for something that up until then was just lying around. But the latest fad just baffles me completely, sending all your gold in an envelope for cash. So, to recap, they want you to send your most valuable possessions in an uninsured envelope, something they call a 'process pak' (unfortunately not a typo), to a processing plant where your gold will be looked at by a valuations team who will then pay you a fair price, or at least a price, before melting your jewellery. There just seems something intrinsically untrustworthy about this, as if their headquarters are set somewhere in Mordor and the gold is melted in Mount Doom to make swords and arrows for Oarks. Come to think of it Cash 4 Gold probably would have saved Froddo an awful lot of time, although even he would have baulked at sending the ring in an uninsured envelope by standard delivery. As a general rule, I refuse to trust any company that has anonymous testimonials as part of its literature. I feel compelled to tell these people that just because you write something in between quotation marks doesn't instantly make it credible, and writing that Joanna thinks that your service is fantastic means fuck all to the rest of us. I don't know who Joanna is, and to be honest, I'm surprised that someone who was apparently so financially fucked that she had to resort to mailing her belongings to a melting factory to get by could find the time or motivation to write about how pleasurable the experience was. If you're going to start making stuff up, how about 'of course having to melt my wedding ring to pay my electricity bill was a real bitch, but given the circumstances the company did what they said they going to do when they said they were going to do it'.

Don't like those, well why not just sell your entire house to some sort of shady phone line and rent it back from them again? How low can this ship sink, Bone Marrow 2 Go? The Insta-Child Adoption Line? I feel bad because these companies are preying on people who grew up and lived through and age where they felt they were entitled to a certain quality of life regardless of whether they could pay for it and are now realising the unpleasant truth that the bubble has burst, but it isn't as if there aren't alternatives to these sleazy phone companies and if you are really prepared to send all your stuff to someone you don't know with nothing but an envelope to protect it then you may as well put whatever little common sense you had in with it.

"You Are What You Wear"

Thanks for that Free Spirit.

If the shop wasn't already a total bastardisation of anything good about alternative sports and culture then it surely is now. The truth about these companies, about the bands that explode with hits on myspace or the people whose twitters are read is that it is done so with the intentions of men and women in expensive suits. Don't forget that.

I understand that Quicksilver, Animal etc. etc. are multinational companies and clearly were always destined to be and to be honest I couldn't give three hoots. But when the silly little impressionable youths only preoccupied with bebo, facebook, skins, shite 80's throwback 'indie' and whatever else will be along in a few months can't see this then I guess we wave goodbye to authenticity forever.

Clearly, it's easy to claim that authenticity is manufactured just about everywhere but it's not true, that's just what businesses want us to think in order to stop us looking for that true authenticity. Businesses want to bring it to 'us' to stop us making it for ourselves. Yes it's fairly obvious, but I bet you take it for granted.

With just about everyone in the world uneasy with venturing from what is acceptable, now that facebook forces us to compare every and any bloody thing happening in our social lives, I guess we're not even allowed to complain that this is the way it is.

Shame really, because it seems to me that it has suddenly become unneccesarily hard for people to find the truely alternative side of life. How? Because they think they already have it and that actually is a shame.

So no - Free Spirit, you are wrong. You are not what you bloody wear, you are not what you post yourself posing as in facebook, you are not the culmination of your twitters, you are what you do away from all that crap.

Fools.....rebel!

To Twitter or Not to Twitter?

By Alex Allen

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It's a slippery slope becoming an old person. And I know that 70 is the 50 etc etc, but have you noticed that it's generally 70 year olds that say that? Before you know it, you're holding on to that veneer panelled 21" television because it 'works perfectly well' and does 'everything you need'. This is a stupid argument in itself, who actually needs a television? Nobody. It's a total luxury in itself, in terms of an actual use, it doesn't have one. There's only one end to that depressing situation, buying your electrical goods from the Co-Op department store because 'you trust it and they're reliable', and basing you next hifi on the criteria of 'being sturdy'. I refuse to let this happen to me. I'm going to be the exception to that rule, I'm going to change history, you'll see. Having made these points, I find it extremely important not to lose sight of the next big thing. I refuse to be the stubborn friend that refuses to sign up to facebook because they prefer their simple life. Of course, in the end, everybody caves in that respect, usually under the guise that they've 'just joined to look at the photos'. The trouble with Twitter is, I just don't get it. Obviously I understand what it does, I'm not an idiot, I just don't find what it does that is particularly useful. If you don't know what Twitter is, essentially it's another user generated content website that gives you 140 characters to let the world know what you're doing at any given time. It's like a website with just the facebook status updates and nothing else. That's great if you lead an full, exciting life which warrants a minute by minute update.
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Mine doesn't. In fact, usually the reason I'm logging in to Twitter is because I'm doing nothing. What am I really doing? Probably lounging on the sofa watching the Half Ton Son. Who wants to read about that? If I was out gallivanting round the west end, watching musicals, and eating in expensive restaurants the last thing I'd be concerning myself with is whether or not I'd updated my band of Twitter followers or not. The trouble is, I trust Stephen Fry. Generally, if I don't agree with him about something it's because I'm wrong, so I feel a bit unsure about condemning something he support so passionately. Still, I think my argument is still founded. Stephen Fry is interesting, he does interesting things, and there are thousands of people who are interested in reading about them. As a celebrity update service, which humanises celebrities and lets us, the public, see what they're up to, what they think, and goes deeper than their portrayal as a brand, it's really good. Unfortunately, few celebrities are willing to put their head on the block by revealing their own personal feelings and opinions about the world, there are simply too many media pitfalls. Nobody wants to be the next Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand, Ross can get away with it - he can do pretty much whatever he wants, but nobody else could. So while a few give their own personal updates, there are a great deal more 'official' celebrity accounts reeling off details of their next cookery book, book signing, gig or signature clothing range. I think it's ultimately facebook for the famous, it's a way for celebrities to give an impression of keeping up with the modern age with little effort. As with all websites based on user generated content, as popularity snowballs it will find itself more and more vulnerable to a sea of advertising which will devour that aspect, too. People will grow tired of sifting through details of the new Mitchell and Webb DVD for something interesting to read. For the common person, I'm not convinced it has even that brief lifespan. These websites rely on new content, on there being something new and interesting to look at. People stalk their friends, look at photos, play around with applications. Will people keep coming back to Twitter to find out what I had for breakfast? I doubt it. Yes people are joining, probably to find out what all the hype is about, I don't think the majority of these people will come back again.

Housekeeping

You may have noticed, or alternatively are just realising this very moment, that the advertisements on Rooha are gone. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is because I failed. Make no mistake, I would happily have sold out and renamed this magazine the Rowntree Fruit Pastels Online Magazine, I really would. Equally, I would have loved for our hoards of visitors, and believe me, there are hoards, to click on our Google ads in great numbers and let me retire by the age of 23. Sadly, this didn't happen. This was probably because firstly, people don't like clicking on adverts, and secondly, because our adverts were shit. You see, Google ads works, or doesn't work as the case may be, by taking random words from our entries and generating adverts that will, in theory, be relevant to you, our readers. Google, sadly, never planned for ROOHA, where articles about vending machines can peacefully coexist with angry prose about the decline of Woolworths. So when adverts reading 'Knitting jumpers - need wool?' appeared and nobody clicked, it wasn't particularly surprising. In fact in four months the website made $0.12, and although I can't confirm for sure, I think that was me. Also, in response to suggestions that ROOHA was responsible for the Virgin complaint letter that did the rounds recently, we weren't, much as I would like to take credit for that excellent work and the rage that influenced it.

The Snow Day

By Alex Allen

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Few things seem to generate such a great mis mash of chaos, jubilation and surprise as snow in this country. A celebrity dying, a new England football manager, the final of the The Apprentice, these are the things that are traditionally paramount in stirring our apathetic nation. Snow, strangely, eclipses all of these. There can be as little as a single inch covering the ground, and the whole country comes to a complete stand still. Suddenly, nobody can do anything. Roads are closed, offices and schools shut their doors and people keenly watch weather updates wondering what will happen next. It's as close to an apocalypse as we're likely to see in our lifetime. You can almost feel a genuine air of 'run! Take what you can and save yourselves!' in the air. People feel a spontaneous urge to rush home, clutch loved ones and light candles. Cars lie abandoned at the side of duel carriageways.

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The thing is, snow days are the biggest con ever. 'Oh the snow was so terrible I just couldn't do anything!' Yes, well you couldn't do anything that you didn't want to do. I'm sure the avalanche that prevented you from making it to work for nine didn't prevent you from going shopping or spending the afternoon in the pub instead. It's a total nonsense! New York, Vancouver, Copenhagen, do these countries just shut down for the winter and cease trading? Do the residents hoard canned items like squirrels and just try and brave the weather indoors until spring comes? Of course they don't! It's just an unwritten rule that snowy weather entitles you, the British citizen, one complimentary day off. We all know that snow is absolutely not a plausible excuse for you not being able to attend whichever function you didn't want to turn up to. And it's ok, other countries do it all the time, let's just embrace it.

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People don't seem to know how to process this crazy weather, 52% of our days are overcast, we're not used to it. On my way home from work yesterday, one newspaper stand described the snow as 'the worst snowfall in 18 years'. Doesn't this seem just a little gloomy? Are we not in reality really rather happy about the snow? A day off work, although not for me unfortunately, something interesting to look at, a little excitement in our lives amidst the daily grind. A few metres on and another sign conversely read, 'Snow Day!' We just don't seem to able to agree on what we think of this weather phenomenon, are we for or against? I think it might be down to the general rarity of it, we form an opinion on snow, but there is such a long gap between one spate and another that we lose sight of it. And then there's this strange 'since records began' business. When did records begin? We seem to constantly be beating them, I say we, we're driving the cars and burning the coal, surely we have more claim to these records than the year they happened to happen in. Experts rumble on about global warming, but could it not just be that these records are a bit, well, shit? And if we really shouldn't be trying to beat them because that means that we're destroying our planet, then isn't it really a little shortsighted to have them in the first place? If the MET office say, 'the worst rain fall for June was 1976', then of course we're going to want to beat it, in the same way that my flatmate ate a moth for absolutely no reason other than simply proving to someone he could. We're only human. These things happen. One thing is for certain, not since Kerry Katona has something so undeserving and generally uninteresting generated so many column inches. For adding to those inches, I apologise. More interesting and meaningful subject matter to come I promise.

Holiday Season

By Alex Allen

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Now that Christmas is well and truly over, we've been left holiday-less for a while. Have you ever noticed how much people hate Christmas as soon as the new year starts? All the Christmas cheer, all the good will, putting up the decorations, walking in the snow, gone! Instantly! 'Get that fucking tree down! Put the wrapping paper in the loft, I don't want to look at it! I can't eat any more mince pies, if I see another indian samosa selection pack I'm going to be sick!'. That sort of thing. Of course, we're not completely holiday-less. Tradition and consumerism have ensured that the period between January and December isn't completely barron. In this article, I'm going to talk about a few of our ridiculous holidays that I just can't get on board with. For some reason, this country loves pancake day. You know that feeling when you're in the staff room and parade an opinion on something, politics, sport, anything really, and find nobody else agrees? I faced angry recriminations from three women for criticising the Double Decker bar only yesterday, what can I say? I'm just not a fan. But forget that,try slagging off pancake day and see what happens. Seriously. This is just one of our many pointless holidays. My experiences of pancake day are three hungry people watching one person eat their pancake at a time, because there are never enough pans or hands to cook four pancakes simultaneously, and more the point nobody wants a cold pancake. In your head you imagine piles of pancakes with jars of chocolate, syrup, sugar, lemon and all other manner of delicious things to put over your pancake. In my house, this never happened. This isn't a tale of childhood batter related trauma, it's just reality. The mother takes it upon herself to sacrifice herself for the good of the family. She alone will make all the pancakes. As the other members of the family eat their pancakes from staggered starts, essentially everyone is either standing up, just sitting down or somewhere in the middle, she attempts to eat and cook at the same time. Is this really fun? Are any of us really getting any enjoyment from this?

And then there's Easter. For some, Easter has huge religious significance, it's one of the highlights of their year. But for the many atheists amongst us, there is no significance. For us, Clintons, Hallmark, and others created some sort collosal ficticious rabbit that would galavant through people's gardens, destroying shrubs, uprooting trees and generally making a nuisance of itself. In normal circumstances, this would surely be considered a bad thing, or, a fucking good barbeque. Instead, this rabbit has the good grace to dispense chocolate eggs, and more recently, stuff, material goods for people. Even as a child, I just don't understand how I would have bought this, it's completely implausible. How is this rabbit dispensing these eggs? With the opposable thumbs it doesn't have? Where's the link between a rabbit and an egg anyway? It's a nonsense! Somewhere along the line we completely forgot why we have these holidays, and they just become opportunities to exchange stuff and own more new shiny things. At least Halloween has the good grace to acknowledge that it is essentially based on blackmail. It's just 'give me sweets or I'll smash up your house', that pretty much sums it up, doesn't it? Yes there are costumes, but the basis of it is a communal threat. In this country most kids have no interest in the costume or the sweets anyway, they just want to break stuff. Easter, well that's rather more 'yes the ressucrection of Christ was good, but you know what, it'd be better with chocolate and a Nintendo Wii'.

As for April Fools day, this just seems like something a hilarious work colleague came up with to justify swapping the sugar and the salt in the staff canteen with hilarious consequences. Apparently, unless you complete your prank before midday then it doesn't count. Or, of course, you could just not do it at all. I mean, actually, don't. Because whilst there's the potential for carnage, the reality is people taking the the staples out of staplers and other disappointing efforts. Work endorsed fun is always something that should be avoided. Helen is wearing a funny wig all day for Comic Relief and will I sponsor her £2? I'll tell you what, I'll give her £5 to burn that wig and never, ever mention it again. That's how you combine good will and get something out of it too, Sue. You give a little you get a little, you see? Personally I think that as the days begin to get longer and the weather gets better, that's relief enough from the nine til five for me.

When it Rains it Pours

By Alex Allen

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There are certain things in life that I've come to accept that, although they aren't nice, are just unavoidable. Things like paying the electricity bill, applying for a new passport and being charged an extortionate amount to take your cat to the vet. But then there's rain. It seems to me that in a modern world where we can do all our shopping from a computer, carry out heart transplants and other complex surgery and travel from England to France in a channel under the sea, surely we can do something about the rain. At the moment our best solution is some kind of portable roof, we try and dress it up with impressive terminology, the 'umbrella', but a personal roof is essentially what it is. Is it windproof? No. Do you end up getting wet anyway? You bet you fucking do. I dream of a world where we don't have to put up with getting drenched, in fact, since it's a dream, let's get rid of all the bad weather. Hail, gales, slush, enough's enough. Everything about rain is unpleasant. Looking past the fact that it feels cold and makes you wet, it has the effect of making you turn up to wherever you were going looking like some kind of wet dog. And it doesn't just happen on any day, either. Job interviews, formal occasions, meetings, these are the kind of days we can expect rain. Yet somehow, inexplicably, nobody else is ever wet. Somehow, you turn up to the office and find that everyone else is completely dry, like they've taken some kind of underground tunnel to work. It's a weird thing, it's only OK to be wet outside, that's where the water falls. Suddenly, when you're indoors it's no longer OK to be wet, now you just look like an idiot. Without the rain, there could be any reason for it, you could have just had an unfortunate incident with a water cooler. Every now and again someone will walk in to office soaking wet, and nobody will bat an eyelid. This man, however, thinks his soaking clothing is big news, so he will stand by his desk spluttering and staring at his suit in disbelief until someone eventually feels obliged to ask if it's wet outside. I despair.

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And then there's the process of acknowledging rain. In school, college, university, the office, anywhere really, there is always a rain monitor. Watch out for them, it's a formality, they will be there. These people will take it upon themselves, appoint themselves, to inform others that the weather has turned and the rain is falling. 'Ooh, it's really coming down outside', is the sort of thing you can expect to hear, as if it's brand new, unheard information, despite the world outside the windows in the building you are in being visible to everyone. Even in an office I worked in which was surrounded by glass walls on two sides someone said it. I don't know if there is some sort of rain monitoring organisation where these people congregate and discuss, well, rain I imagine. I assume they would spend their meetings swapping hilarious anecdotes and reminiscences of rain, and compile rotas of different regions and the schools, workplaces, shops bars and cafes within them so as to spread their members evenly across the country. Of course, I have no solution to this problem. I did briefly have some kind of giant, transparent funnel concept that we would just use to catch all the rain, but quickly realised it was stupid and wouldn't work for various reasons. Frankly, I'm not even really sure why I mentioned it, it certainly doesn't improve my credibility as a writer or, come to think of it, a human being.

Money Sense

By Alex Allen

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I never really care much about banks. It's not that I have some kind of innate dislike for them, there's just no real emotion either way, it's a general feeling of 'meh'. I know that it probably makes me sound ill informed and uneducated, but I still don't completely understand how a bank can go from being perfectly fine one day to being minutes away from folding completely the next. Hell, come to think of it, if someone asked me what a bank actually was I wouldn't really even know what to tell them. It sounds stupid, but just think for a second, what is a bank? Whenever I mention my general lack of of understanding of banks, some people take that as me saying I'd like to know more about them. Not true, I wouldn't. Actually I don't care at all, I am one of the many people in this country that has no interest in banking whatsoever and is completely bemused by the Dow Jones, the FTSE 100 and the stock exchange. Whenever it comes on at the end of the news I start thinking about other things, what I'm going to have for dinner, future consumer items I might like to buy, that sort of thing. Banks know this, that's why when it became time for me to choose my current student account, I naturally went for the bank that was offering me the best free stuff. Did I need the brand new Liberty X album and two cinema vouchers? Did I fuck.

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However, even with my basic level of understanding, banks were one of the biggest culprits in causing the current global recession and that horrendous term that will be with us for as long as we live, the credit crunch, so why on earth would they think the public would want their advice on budgeting and handling money of all things? It's ludicrous, it would be like letting Kerry Katona become health minister. And it isn't just because of the irony of where the advice is coming from, it's the patronising, condescending nature of the advice itself, too. 'I see you're going to the gym, why not run down the road instead?' Are Natwest really so out of touch that they think, recession or no recession, that people want to spend their free time in their local Natwest branch being talked down to by a frumpy, thirty-something, cat owning spinster? The only people who are stupid enough to need to be talked through their money by someone as stupid as these moneysense advisers don't even have bank accounts. They keep all their money in a big pile under their mattress and leave their Alsatian at home to guard it. People aren't stupid, they know that if they spend all their money at the pub then they won't have any money left. They've only trained one thousand of these people to lecture people on their money spending, and when you put that in to context of the number of customers they have it really isn't much at all. That's because they know that in practice it's a stupid idea that nobody will ever use. Can you imagine sitting in the middle of the bank on a Saturday morning being told you need to shop around more for your gas and electricity provider in front of other customers like some weird social experiment? It's a massive PR stunt to try and show that despite being partly to blame for it, Natwest really do care about your money worries. Unfortunately, nobody seems to believe them.

Iceland Are Taking Over the World? Run! Save Yourselves!

By Alex Allen

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I like writing, which is a good thing, it's what I do after all, but it does have its disadvantages. One disadvantage is that it's always up to the reader how they want to interpret what they're reading. Things like inflections and the tone of the story can be misrepresented or interpreted differently by different people. For example, someone spoke to me today and said 'oh did you hear? Iceland have bought sixty Woolworths stores'. They had assumed it was a positive story, the facts had been laid out for them on the BBC news page and they had seen this as good news. I'd actually already read it, but I had interpreted it rather as, 'oh no, Iceland have bought sixty Woolworths stores'. My interpretation was that this was really rather bad news, that Iceland were expanding their obesity factories across more towns and cities throughout the country. This is the danger of written journalism. On television there are no such problems, George Alagiah either uses his 'Iraq' voice or his 'and finally' voice, and this is how we tell the tone of all news items and how we should feel about them. Still, I'm sure Iceland will save 2,500 from unemployment from this expansion. It's going to kill them all with £1 cheesecakes and potato croquets.

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I always think Iceland must have started out as a bet between two men, one bet the other that not all food ingredients could be served in breadcrumbs and the rest was history. Before Iceland, I had never seen a three litre bottle of diet coke before. People are scared and intimidated by bottles of fizzy drink that size. Yes, people probably drink that much over time, but owning a bottle that size is a frank admission that you are an unhealthy slob, slowly dissolving your teeth. I wouldn't buy one for the same reason I wouldn't buy a 1000KG bag of sugar. I'd probably eventually use it all, but nobody wants to see something that is that bad for them in that sort of quantity. If you care to look at the packaging on Iceland's variety of bread crumbed fare, you will notice that they have chosen not to adopt the standard nutrition wheel to notify consumers of the contents of their products. This is because the colour of that wheel has not actually been invented yet, it's going to be somewhere between conventional black and drowned puppies. I think we'll be able to be certain that the recession is starting to take its toll when someone takes a shepard's pie, curly fries, chicken nuggets and an apple crumble on to Ready Steady Cook. I remember my first visit, it was in the second year of university, I was fairly broke and I went in there and quickly realised that I could survive for about four years from £10 worth of food. I thought that it was the best thing I'd ever seen, it was reminiscent of the first year when I was writing an essay and stumbled across Wikipedia and thought I was going to be sorted academically for life. I sincerely hope that this isn't what diet, or employment for that matter, is going to come to as a result of the recession. Let's not all go mental, things may be rough, but there's no need to hit the freezers no matter how hard our credit has been crunched.

Polite Conversation

By Alex Allen

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I think it's probably about the age of sixteen when you have to start making polite conversation. Before that, everything was easier. If you didn't want to talk to people, especially people your own age, then you just, well, didn't. You didn't even have to be nice to people, there were kids that went to my secondary school that nobody ever talked to. Ever. There was one girl who I don't think I ever heard speak, I like to think she's got a nice job in a library somewhere now. Maybe she'll surprise me and become the new Carol Vorderman on Countdown, stranger things have happened. Older people worry about making friends more, they worry that once university is over their friend pool will just dry up. Suddenly, there are dinner parties and work outings and polite conversation becomes a part of everyday life. Of course, you have friends at work, but it isn't really as if there's any reason for you to become best friends with everyone. After all, it's not as if you were all brought together through shared interests, you just work together. Still, there are always people at work that want to organise outings and force that friendship, it's every badly written Trouble sitcom, the interaction with people in the office.

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For some reason, whenever you introduce one friend to another, you always feel obliged to provide some sort of introductory line. Usually, what you say associates them with some sort of skill, 'Ben, this is Tom, he's a really good guitarist' for example, almost as if you're trying to sell them as a friend. It's like, oh, in case you were thinking about assembling the new A-Team, my friend Matt, brilliant with computers. Hmmm, well, I'm not really in the market for a friend that likes computers, but if Chris ever moves away from the area then I'll be bear him in mind, I'll just put his name on my back up list. I think we do it because we hope that introductory line might allow a blossoming friendship based on shared interests to occur. It rarely does, in fact there are few things more excruciating than trying to make a conversation over the fact that you both like, say, to play the guitar. Usually, there won't be an actual guitar in the room, so you start talking about hypothetical guitars. Sometimes you won't have heard of the guitar that is being talked about, but because you were introduced as some kind of guitar playing supremo you can't show any weakness concerning your specialist subject. So you just nod along as the other person talks about treble and pickups, making muffled knowledgeable and agreeable sounds. If you think I'm exaggerating this, I was sitting with some of my flatmate's friends when I was out the other night, and was introduced as being 'in PR' even though I've only ever done one internship which was six months ago. The result was a twenty minute conversation with a young entrepreneur that resulted in me taking his business card (if you're reading this and were the owner of that business card, I apologise but I lost it about four minutes after you gave it to me. If it's any consolation, I had no contacts anyway). It's strange, because both people involved in the conversation know what's going on. If there was some kind of socially acceptable way of both parties mutually agreeing to end the conversation without causing offence, they would. It isn't that people are unsociable, it's just that generally that way of people meeting doesn't work. For example, even in a university history seminar, the chances are that other people at that seminar will be similar to you, you've all ended up there because you have a shared interest in history. Therefore there's a reasonable chance of you getting on with other people in that group. It's really just the format of 'you like this, and you like it too, be friends! Go!' that scares people, but I'm sure there are many friendships that blossomed out of this socially conventional friend matchmaking.

The Art of Arguments

By Alex Allen

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I'm not good at arguing. I don't mean I don't argue, rather that when I do I'm just not very good at it. If I'd been going door to door selling the Obama campaign to American voters, I could have easily have had John McCain elected, I'm just that good (or bad). Fortunately, I did my part for Barack by staying at home and only promoting his cause to people at work who either didn't care, or weren't eligible to vote anyway. Generally, I find that someone has a point to make that I hadn't thought of, it happened quite a lot in my political science seminars when one of the kids that wore a German military jacket and had a name like Tarquin would disprove one of my presentation arguments. In that sort of situation, there's rarely a plan B. I know I'm fucked. But you can't just say, OK, I've got nothing, you win. They want an argument, it's like sex to them. They spend the whole week holed up in the library with the works of Satre (such was my lack of attention to that second year politics unit, I actually just had to Google 'political philosophers' to find that) just studying for the big day of the seminar. It's not that I'm thick (hopefully), I think it's more the pressure of face to face intellectual combat that's the problem. I get flustered and lose sight of what my point was in the first place. Before I know it, I'm nothing but a mumbling mess. Fortunately journalism offers little need for this skill, you write your argument, in a professional capacity mine would be more balanced than this, and then people read it. Whether they agree or disagree, generally you don't have to defend your words, at least not face to face. You at least have time to compose some sort of defence, and there are a variety of people to prevent you from writing anything too outlandish in the first place.

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I don't know if you've ever noticed, but old(er) people (they don't like being called old, trust me) can't use technology. I received a phone call on Friday from someone, I won't say who, who had apparently 'deleted all their songs on iTunes'. I just don't know how you can do that by accident, and as you're trying to talk the technically challenged through their technical problems you get more and more frustrated. 'I've deleted the internet!' You've what? That doesn't make any sense, you can't just delete the internet. This is a classic example of an instance when someone will say something that is just so wrong you almost struggle to process it. You know that they're wrong, extremely, categorically, incomprehensibly wrong, but you can't actually find the words to start explaining why. A former work colleague once commented that it was '2-1 between us and them because they did us over with 9/11, then we fucked them over with Iraq, but then they got us in London again'. There are just so many mistakes in that statement that I just didn't know how to disprove it. In that sort of situation, most people have a section of their brain that would come up with reasons why that statement is incorrect, a part of their brain that forms arguments. I just don't have it. I just spout vitriol, often incomprehensibly, at the person in question. In regard to the incident with the work colleague, he actually thought he had won that debate. And yes, in the grand scheme of things I knew this man ogre would almost certainly not win, but in this instance he had a point. He had a very irritating habit of coming up with these sort of statements as he walked in to the lift, which then imposed an enforced time limit for a response before the doors closed and he smiled gormlessly as it carried him to another floor. He seemed to know it too, he'd regularly save particularly ridiculous statements for the lift. 'I think the whole world should just speak English and use the pound' (doors close). Or 'I think everyone should be allowed to drive monster trucks on the motorway'(doors close). Perhaps other respected figures deal with giving unpopular news in the same way, maybe Alistair Darling should just give his next budget from the lift in a House of Fraser, and when he comes to an unpopular point about increasing tax on alcohol, just pick a floor, any floor. In short, please do not disagree with this article, because as I have previously revealed, I would have absolutely no ability at all to counter your criticisms.

Why Television is Not the Miracle Cure

By Alex Allen

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If you've ever found yourself sitting at home during in the middle of the day watching television, and everybody has, either through illness, laziness or some other reason, then you might have noticed the number of sleazy companies that buy up advertising space to cater for what they perceive to be an audience of drunks, drug addicts and the unemployed looking for a quick fix to their problems. I feel compelled to inform Jamster that everybody that wants their 'Silence! I kill you! ring tone now has it. The rest of us don't want it, in fact, we want the opposite to having it. We want it to disappear. Forever. The same applies to the 'Hey girl! You better check yo' text', and 'Na na na na na I've got a text and you can't see it!' ring tones. I cannot possibly imagine who has bought any of those products. I assume somebody must have bought them, otherwise the advert would be redundant. However, I don't think it's too excessive to recommend that all those caught downloading any Jamster ring tone should be tarred and feathered immediately. It sounds a little over the top, but word would quickly spread and people would start using a bit more common sense. £4.50 a week for three ring tones? Why don't these people just spend their money on magic beans? It's staggering, really.

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Also in the same mould of phone based recreation, are those awful girl chat lines (I have seen one advert for a gay text chat line, it was called, I kid you not, Bent Chat). A recent ad suggested, 'Have you made your new year's resolution to meet loads of cool girls through text?' I sincerely hope that nobody's new year's resolution was to just sit at home with their phone paying x pounds per text to receive responses from what must either be a machine, or a fifty year old woman from Slough. Neither of those scenarios should be treated as anyone's ambition, rather the desperate state of affairs a newly divorced and desperately lonely man might find himself in as he sits alone in his cheap hotel room. Another advert advised potential customers that 'to receive messages and videos of woman over 20 dial x, for woman over 30 add 02, for women over 40 add 03, for women over 50 ad 04'. Woah, woah, woah, women over 50, who would want that? The only word that comes to mind, and I think it is appropriate, is 'bleurgh'.

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As if that wasn't enough, there are various Skills Train adverts doing the rounds. No man or woman vaguely in possession of their senses would think that their life might turn around after becoming a passenger on the skills train. Their website actually has testimonials on it, “Fantastic! Much better than expected. Learnt so much I can't wait for next practical week.”Tricia, August 2006, is just one of them. Who the fuck is Tricia? That's not evidence! That's not a ringing endorsement that your course is a credible way to learn a trade Skills Train! It's just evidence that you're capable of picking a first name at random effectively. I despair, but have absolutely no sympathy with these people who end up on Watchdog complaining that actually, it was all a scam and nobody is recognising their new found ability to fix electrical goods. The truth is there are no quick fixes people. If your job isn't what you'd hoped for, that almost certainly can't be remedied by paying £75 for a book, even if Trisha things it's the best experience she's ever had! In a similar vein, is that 'woman' you're texting really bringing you genuine fulfilment? Because honestly, I can't tell you how many happy couples I know that started just that way. Rarely can problems in our lives be instantly rectified so quickly and painlessly, and just because these products don't look like magic beans, doesn't make the people that use them any less desperate and stupid.

Angus, Anyone?

By Alex Allen

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When was it that Burger King became so obsessed with Aberdeen Angus beef? More to the point, why are they so surprised that nobody seems to believe them? Let me help you out Burger King, it's because your burger meal costs about five pounds. From that, you need to subtract the cost of paying your staff, maintaining your store by paying the bills and buying cleaning supplies as well as turning over a profit. How much money does the really leave for ingredients? Absolutely fuck all. So forgive me if I'm slightly sceptical about your quality produce Burger King. What they don't seem to understand, is that their customers have spent their whole lives trying to mentally block out what they're eating there. When I go in to a Burger King the last thing I want to see is that fucking nutrition wheel on everything I order, telling me that everything is code orange. The truth is, that if I ever actually thought for more than two minutes continually about what the likely ingredients of my Whopper were, I'd probably be put off burgers forever. That's why these places have to give their products stupid names that detract from what's actually in them. Big Mac, Whopper, Zinger burger, they're all complete nonsense, what does Zinger even mean? So when Gillian 'shit analyser' McKeith comes on the television with the sensational scoop that, brace yourselves, sausages are bad, I always think the same thing. Of course they are, people aren't idiots (well, some are).

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Things that taste good will, invariably, have one or more of butter, sugar, fat or salt in them if they taste good. It's a simple enough equation. And I know that that isn't a particularly mature way of dealing with health issues, but people get that fast food isn't good for you. This ludicrous idea that somehow Burger King has become a place to go for good dining is completely out of the left field. It's a place to go when you're unbelievably hungry at a service station or London underground, and the only alternative is an Upper Crust. There are few other times in my life when I can justify ordering an XL bacon double cheeseburger, honestly, I think you have to run a half marathon just to burn it off. Burger King are good at offering you add ons to your meal, things that when you're hungry, you're going to want. 'Do you want to add bacon to that for thirty pence?' I challenge anyone to find an instance when they wouldn't want to add bacon to something! Pancakes, sandwiches, burgers, bacon is a human super food. It's not fair to ask that question to someone. Other items that you can be lured by include cheese, onion rings and barbecue sauce. When you're sitting there with your burger in the departure lounge waiting , and we've all been there, the last thing you feel is classy. If I was classy, I'd be sitting in first class on the fucking plane eating nice food already. As it is, I'm sitting in a booth squirting ketchup over my burger, and last thing I feel like in that situation is to start classily tucking in to some Aberdeen Angus beef.

What a Difference a Week Makes!

By Tom Clarke

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Picture the scene: it's Friday 2nd January, 8am, it's cold. I'm walking towards work still trying to shake off the remains of the new year's eve hangover, the biggest decision I really feel like making is whether to have a tea or a coffee.

I get into work to the news that the area manager is going to be here in an hour for a meeting. Sure no problem, it will probably just be a post-christmas de-briefing (you know the script "I'm very impressed with your sales over Christmas, however we can't afford to take our foot off the gas blah blah blah) and I could have quite happily sat through it, making the right sounds at appropriate times before retiring to my office to sit on facebook and pretend to be doing some kind of stock audit.

But no, the 'meeting' is in fact him just telling us that our pub will be closing down at some point in January, and it could be as soon as next Wednesday. Fuck. I'm sure you can imagine how difficult it is to motivate a staff to work hard for you all weekend when they've just found out they're out of a job in as little as five days.

And as tomorrow is the aforementioned 'next wednesday', I am soon to be officially 'in limbo' (not sure if that's the right expression but I've been meaning to use it for ages.

What's next then? Redundancy? Relocation? Endless episodes of Jeremy Kyle? I have no idea.

Happy new year indeed.

Can Cook Will Cook

By Alex Allen

It wasn't that long ago that the only person on TV who was allowed to cook anything was Delia. She would cook things, release sporadic books documenting how these dishes were made, and we, the people, would follow her lead and make them too. Before Delia, I just assume that people didn't cook. They would just stare blankly at their ingredients, and eat them raw individually. Back then, any man who tried his hand at making food seemed like some kind of dangerous new agey liberal. Now, things are different. People have since realised that Delia's food was boring. They have also realised that she was boring, as has since been proven by her new cook book 'Delia's Frugal Cooking'. Bleurgh. As that was happening, Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver came to the fore, shouting fuck and pukka and making cooking in general seem OK for men to do. The general rule, is that as long as you don't use any adjectives, it's OK. Just use verbs, big, manly verbs. Chop, slice, dice, crunch - all absolutely fine. Somewhere along the line, the man was made redundant from his job as hunter and gatherer. Now, Tesco does all our hunting and gathering for us, it packages the products, cleans them. All we have to do is pick them off the shevles and push them to the car. Gordon Ramsay was voted the man most men would like to be in 2008, and although Jamie Oliver's perennial crusades against obesity became a bit much (if they want to kill themselves with kebabs, leave them to it), the point was made. Men, could cook. And not just men in bright chef's whites, fussing over Michelin starred food in London and Paris, ordinary men. The kind of men who wander around corner shops trying to find balsamic vinegar or marjoram for the impressive pasta dish they're attempting to impress their girlfriend with. I think part of this cooking revolution is that all men, essentially, want to be superheroes. It's unfinished childhood business. Unfortunately, it's not possible, no matter how much Fathers 4 Justice might want it to be. The nearest thing you can get, is to be Cooking Man! Yes, I am a normal man, I work a nine til five job, I drive a crappy car and I live in a small, sparsely decorated flat, but when the the clock strikes seven, I become 'Cooking Man!' Watch as I turn this milk, butter and flour in to a simple roux before your very eyes! This is why you never hear about any man's cooking skills straight away. He likes to lure guests to his apartment and lower their expectations. Then, when they're expecting the worst, he announces it! 'I, Alexander James Allen, (pause for effect) can cook! Marvel at my souffle! Gasp at my roasted sea bass!' Then, he sits back and enjoys the new found respect from his peers.

Of course, there are still things that aren't acceptable. If you wear an apron, especially one that has some sort of witty slogan on it, you will look like an idiot. Anything like 'what's cookin' good lookin'' and you can look forward to a lifetime of enforced celibacy. The same applies to any amateur that opts for the French chef's hat. I don't even know where those are available for purchase, but if you do, again, you will look like an idiot. The bottom line is that cooking has been opened up to the masses. Yes, as Jamie Oliver's latest crusade teaching people to pass on recipes to each other proved, some people are extremely stupid. Rotherham will apparently only continue to exist because of the development of ready meals and the medical advancement that has allowed surgeons to suck the fat inducing remnants of those ready meals back out of those who consume them. However, in theory, any man may cook, it's just about promoting the right image.